Worse than I thought...

What I won't do to have an electronic original.

The OCR of Thursday's job had a lot more problems associated with it than were apparent at first.

Primo, and I don't know if this is solvable, the end result in Word is not very consistent as far as formatting is concerned. I ended up having to do a select-all to standardize the font, font size, and other font parameters. Then I ended up applying a "plain vanilla" paragraph format to the text, after which I went though and formatted it to resemble the original (which for nearly 14,000 words is no fun).

Most tables came out okay, but I had to completely reformat them to get away from the hard-coded row heights. Then I noticed the seemingly random hard returns in the middle of paragraphs, not to mention the soft hyphens that didn't always show up on the screen, as well as the words that were split between two lines (and nary a hint as to what was keeping them apart... neither soft hyphens nor paragraph marks were at fault).

In all, I probably put in a good three hours on the file, and although it's far less time than I would have spent typing the thing in by hand (actually, I wouldn't have... spent the time, that is), it's three hours I don't really have right now. On the other hand, the file looks really good now! Also, working with the text (indirectly, so to speak) gives me a better idea as to repeating sections (some, not many) and general difficulty (not a snap, but not hard, either).

* * *Galina went to the kids' place to look after Huntur while the kids go off to have fun at Navajo Lake. The ladies dropped by here around 8:30 pm or so for us to go out for dinner, which we had at a place called the Italian Kitchen. (Usually, places with simple names like that are pretty good... usually.) The focus of the evening was "PIZZA!," a syllable pair that Huntur seemed to take great pleasure in repeating over and over again. (Poor thing, I think she tuckered herself out waiting for the pie to come out of the oven!). A medium pizza and a couple of beers for me and a couple of glasses of wine for Galina came out to just under $30. Yeow!

I had Galina drop me off some distance from the house, as she was going back to the kids' place to put Huntur to sleep and settle in for the night herself. I enjoyed the walk, except for the fact that my sandaled feet started to complain a bit early in the trek. The moon was full, the temperature was just right, and there were no cars on the road. It was a brisk walk, and quite enjoyable.

So here it is, just after midnight, and I am all in. Gotta go cut some Z's.

Cheers...

The old fashioned way...

I was, if anything, an "early adopeter" of the idea of on-screen editing.

Understand, it was a change for me, as all my previous training (writing papers, letters for publication, articles for the college paper) had ingrained the use of typewriter, paper, and red pencil for any written endeavors. Nonetheless, there were factors driving me away from paper-based editing.

For one thing, back when my translation got "computerized" (ca. 1981), my daisy-wheel printer was a cheap but reliable machine that output all of ten characters per second. If one assumes the traditional 6 characters per word (5 letters and a space), then a 1000-word translation would take 600 seconds (or 10 minutes) to print out. A 6000-word job would take an hour, and so on.

And since one submitted printed output as the final product in those days, that meant printing the job again, after editing it to perfection. This rapidly shortened the service life of the proprietary (and not inexpensive) film ribbon cartridge used by my printer, so between savings of time and money... well, you get the picture.

There was another factor egging me on to edit on-screen, however: impatience. I'd start to edit something on paper and then, before you knew it, I'd lost control of the process because I could "see" what needed to be done to the document. So typically, I'd stop editing somewhere around page four and sit down at the keyboard.

So now, I edit on paper only when I have to compare a lot of details in text (equations come to mind, here). The last part of 60K was such a document, and I am actually amazed that I was able to curb my usual impatience.

In any event, despite my initial plan to do it in chunks (to keep the mind fresh), I sat down around 9:15 this morning and went pretty much straight through (to get it over with). I finished the paper edit a few minutes ago, almost exactly 5 hours later. Now I need to go through the 90+ pages and incorporate the edits, most of which are typos the spell check didn't find along with a handful of "style" changes to make things sound better. The items that will take probably the most time are the three small omissions I found (probably a total of 60-70 words in a 20,000 word document), and editing two figures, in which I entered incorrect subscripts for a transistor current.

Then I absolutely need to get cracking on the Thursday job.

But I sure would like to go out and do something with Galina for an hour or two, also, so we'll see what develops.

Cheers...

Fortunately, not when it's important...

The title refers to the second time (in recent memory) that my VAIO has spontaneously rebooted while I have been using it. The first time, if memory serves, was in beautiful downtown Burbank Kazakhstan.

This time, the machine took a quick vacation to wherever computers go when they suddenly reboot and then restarted itself with no disk checks or anything... the only telltale left to indicate anything is awry is the Active Desktop Recovery screen that asks me to click on the "Recover my Active Desktop" button. A message partially obscured by icons on my desktop starts, "Microsoft Windows has experienced an unexpected error."

Gee, tell me something I don't know.

Anyway, the short item from last week is gone and invoiced, and the 60K job is gone and invoiced. We're not out of the woods yet, though... and a good thing, too!

* * *After putting the finishing touches on the last of the 60K job, Galina and I went out to eat at a place called "Ramon's" (pronounced "ruh-MOANS"), where Galina ordered a quesadilla, while I celebrated with a marguerita and something called "la banderilla" (advertised as the house 'patriotic' dish... which wasn't what induced me to order it, but I was mildly amused to find out that the colors of the dish ran more along the lines of green, white, and red rather than red, white, and blue, but I digress...).

After dinner, we stopped by the kids' place, where I was informed that my birthday DVD to Huntur of Russian children's animation would not play on their PlayStation (which is what they use for playing DVDs). Once I finish with this post, I might go upstairs to see if it will play on the sub-$100 player I picked up at Wal-Mart a while back. If it doesn't, I'll try to play it on the VAIO, which is suitably equipped. If it still doesn't play, I will be suitably upset, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it.

Cheers...